Metadata Catalogues
Contributing organisations publish metadata to the AODN by providing ISO 19115 compliant metadata, which is harvested into the primary AODN GeoNetwork metadata catalogue. The AODN catalogue provides visibility of all AODN relevant metadata. The majority of the metadata records provide access to the data that they describe, either the data can be downloaded directly, or the user is directed to a webpage provided by the AODN contributor for data access. The remainder of the metadata records either describe how users can obtain the data, e.g. by the provision of contact details of the principal investigator, or simply document the existence of the data which is not currently accessible, for example due to the researcher embargoing it for publication purposes.
The AODN provides discovery and access services through three mechanisms: the IMOS metadata catalogue, the AODN metadata catalogue and the AODN Portal (primary data access point).
Metadata and the AODN Portal
Contributing organisations are also able to publish metadata and data through the AODN Portal, by the provision of ISO 19115 metadata which are marked up with OGC web compliant services and AODN controlled vocabularies. These selected metadata are harvested from contributors and stored in a second GeoNetwork instance that backs the Portal.
The AODN Portal is designed to be an intuitive and easy to use access point for ocean data. All published data collections can be downloaded through the user interface. The AODN Portal is a consumer of web services including OGC CSW which is used to query the catalogue.
The AODN Portal also consumes web services defined in the metadata and it uses these to provide visualisation, subsetting, and data download to end users.